Phil Hope: We will happily take forward the challenge that my hon. Friend has given to me. He will be pleased to learn that only last week I spoke at a conference in Leicester that examined the valuable role that older people play in communities. He will know that we have published a public service agreement called "Later Life", which spells out a range of new targets and new actions, be they about older people playing their part in communities, dealing with social exclusion and poverty, or providing better health services, safer neighbourhoods and independent living—many older people want the ability to make a positive contribution to their community. The new free local bus travel anywhere in the country will certainly benefit many older people, as will the increased winter fuel payment of £50 and of more than £100 for older people. Such measures will directly address some of my hon. Friend's key questions about tackling pensioner poverty.

Phil Hope: The hon. Gentleman is right to suggest that we must do more to ensure that proper services are provided in villages and rural areas. I represent some 60 villages in my constituency and I work closely with them on integrating services, supporting village halls and providing rural transport. He is right to say that we must provide access to services, not only for older people through the use of free bus passes, but for children and young people. That is why we have a presumption against school closures in rural areas and why we are building more affordable homes. I know that some Conservative Members are opposed to home building, but such homes are vital for young people who want to have a house in their own village rather than leave it. That is why we support organisations such as Action with Communities in Rural England—ACRE—which is a strategic partner of the Cabinet Office in developing new policies and strategies to ensure that we address the specific issues about social exclusion and creating strong rural communities.

Edward Miliband: My hon. Friend makes an important point; at a time of financial pressures, third sector organisations in particular can feel the pinch. I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor made announcements in his Budget statement last week that will help charities to the tune of £300 million—that is money that they thought they were going to lose as a result of changes to income tax, but which they will get through gift aid. That will make a difference to them.
	My hon. Friend also emphasises the need to fund small local organisations properly. That is why the new grassroots grants programme, which has been pioneered by my hon. Friend the Member for Corby, will help local organisations with those small sums that can make a big difference to the kind of services that they can provide to the community.

Mark Lancaster: I am pleased that the Minister recognises the contribution that post offices make in both rural and urban communities—I have both in my constituency. But does he understand the anger felt by residents of Little Brickhill when they discovered, through an inadvertent leak on the Post Office website, that their post office was due to close some nine months before the consultation was due to start? Does that not expose what a complete sham the consultation is?

Phil Hope: It is not appropriate for me to comment on any individual post office. However, the hon. Gentleman must recognise that the present subsidy of £3.5 million a week is unaffordable. He is making representations on behalf of his constituents, but I would like to know why, between 1979 and 1997 when his party was in power, 3,500 post offices closed and not one penny subsidy was given to post offices.

Derek Wyatt: I had a rural post office close in Rodmersham, so I wonder whether I could persuade my hon. Friend to speak to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform about merging the rural library service with a rural post office service, so our rural hamlets and villages in my constituency could have such a service at least once a week.

Gordon Brown: Let me also pay a tribute to the Gurkhas. They have been in existence since 1815. They have served loyally in every part of the world, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they fought with Prince Harry over the past few months. They have done a tremendous job for our country. We are the first Government to have given Gurkhas the right to a pension, for those serving after 1997. We are the first to have given equal pay to the Gurkhas. We are the first to have dealt with the problems of married accommodation, and we are the first to say that after four years in the Army they will have the right to residence in this country. Those are changes that we have brought about. Why is the date 1997? It is the date that the Gurkhas, once based in Hong Kong, moved to be based in Britain. That is why we are honouring the promises that we made for the period after 1997.

Gordon Brown: The primary duty of Government, and our abiding obligation, is and will always be the safety of all British people and the protection of the British national interest, so, following approval by the National Security Committee and the Cabinet, the Government are today publishing the first national security strategy. It states that although our obligation to protect the British people and the British national interest is fixed and unwavering, the nature of the threats and the risks that we face have in recent decades changed beyond all recognition and confound all the old assumptions about national defence and international security. As the strategy makes clear, new threats demand new approaches. A radically updated and much more co-ordinated approach is now required.
	For most of the last century, the main threat was unmistakable: a cold war adversary. Today, the potential threats that we face come from far less predictable sources, both state and non-state. Twenty years ago, the terrorist threat to Britain was principally that from the IRA; now it comes from loosely affiliated global networks that threaten us and other nations across continents. Once, when there was instability in faraway regions or countries, we had a choice: to become involved or not. Today no country is, in the old sense, far away, when the consequences of regional instability and terrorism, as well as risks such as climate change, poverty, mass population movements and even organised crime, reverberate quickly round the globe.
	To address these great insecurities—war and terrorism, and now climate change, disease and poverty; threats that redefine national security not just as the protection of the state, but as the protection of all people—we need to mobilise all the resources available to us. They include: the hard power of our military, police, security and intelligence services; the persuasive force and reach of diplomacy and cultural connections; the authority of strengthened global institutions, which can deploy both hard and soft power; and, not least because arms and authority will never be enough, the power of ideas and of shared values and hopes that can win over hearts and minds and forge new partnerships for progress and tolerance, involving Government, the private and voluntary sectors, community and faith organisations, and individuals.
	The foundation of our approach is to maintain strong, balanced, flexible and deployable armed forces. I want to pay tribute to Britain's servicemen and women, and those civilians deployed on operations, who every day face danger doing vital work in the service of our country, and in particular to remember today the sacrifices made for our country by all who have been injured or who have lost their lives in recent years in Iraq, Afghanistan and other theatres of war.
	To raise recruitment and to improve retention in our armed forces, we will match our new public information recruitment campaign, launched this week, with the Government's first ever cross-departmental strategy for supporting our service personnel, their families and veterans. This will be published shortly.
	In the past two years we have raised general pay levels and introduced the first tax-free bonus of nearly £400 a month for those on operations, as well as a council tax refund, and today the Secretary of State for Defence is announcing new retention incentives for our armed forces. There will be increased commitment bonuses of up to £15,000 for longer-serving personnel, and, starting with a new £20 million home purchase fund, we will respond to the demand for more affordable home ownership for servicemen and women.
	I can also inform the House that, to meet the threats ahead, after a trebling of its budget since 2001, the Security Service will rise in number to 4,000, which is twice the level of 2001. I can also inform the House that we will be increasing yet again, this time by 10 per cent., the resources for the joint terrorism analysis centre, which brings together 16 departments including the police and intelligence agencies, and giving it a new focus on the longer-term challenge of investigating the path to violent extremism.
	I can also confirm that, to meet future security needs, we have set aside funds to modernise our interception capability; that at GCHQ and in the Secret Intelligence Service, we are developing new technical capabilities to root out terrorism; and that the new Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, which we set up last year, will provide a higher level of protection against internet-based threats.
	The strategy published today will be backed up by a new approach to engage and inform the public. Two years ago, we removed from being classified as secret the information on threat levels for the UK. We will now go much further. Starting later this year, we will openly publish for the first time a national register of risks—information that was previously held confidentially within Government—so that the British public can see at first hand the challenges that we face and the levels of threat that we have assessed.
	To harness a much wider range of expertise and experience from outside Government, and to help us plan for the future, we are inviting business, academics, community organisations and military and security experts from outside Government to join a new national security forum that will advise the recently constituted National Security Committee. Having accepted the recommendation of the Intelligence and Security Committee—I thank it for its work—to separate the position of Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee from policy adviser to the Government, and having appointed Mr. Alex Allan as Chair of the JIC, I can confirm that, as proposed by the Butler review, his responsibility will be solely to provide Ministers with security assessments formulated independently of the political process.
	We will also immediately go ahead to introduce a resolution of both Houses—in advance of any future legislation—that will enshrine an enhanced scrutiny and public role for the Intelligence and Security Committee. This will lead to more parliamentary debate on security matters, to public hearings on the national security strategy, and—as promised—to greater transparency over appointments to the Committee, so that the Committee can not only review intelligence and security but perform a public role more akin to the practice of Select Committees generally in reporting to and informing the country on security matters.
	Emerging from all the experience and lessons learned of the last decade is the clear conclusion that we are strongest when we combine the resources of our military, police and security and intelligence services with effective diplomacy, and when we work closely with international partners to confront the new global challenges and bring about change. This approach emphasises the importance of strengthening our key diplomatic and military alliances: with the United States, our strongest bilateral partner; with NATO as the cornerstone of our security; with our central role at the heart of an outward-facing European Union; and with our long-lasting and deep commitment to the Commonwealth and to working through international institutions.
	I can tell the House that Britain will be at the forefront of diplomatic action on nuclear weapons control and reduction, offering a new bargain to non-nuclear powers. On the one hand, we will help them, and we have proposed the creation of a new international system to help non-nuclear states to acquire the new sources of energy that they need, including through our proposed global enrichment bond, and we are today inviting interested countries to an international conference on these important themes later this year.
	In return, we will seek agreement on tougher controls aimed at reducing weapons and preventing proliferation—first, by ending the stalemates on the fissile material cut-off treaty and the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty and, secondly, by achieving, after 2010, a more robust implementation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty with the aim of accelerating disarmament among possessor states, preventing proliferation and, ultimately, freeing the world from nuclear weapons. And, as a new priority to meet the dangers both of proliferation to new states and of material falling into the hands of terrorists, we propose not only tougher action against potential proliferators such as Iran but new action against suppliers. We are seeking to strengthen export control regimes and build a more effective forensic nuclear capability in order to determine and expose the true source of material employed in any nuclear device. Having already reduced the number of our operationally available warheads by 20 per cent. and made our expertise available for the verifiable elimination of warheads, I can confirm that we, Britain, are ready to play our part in further disarmament.
	As great a potential threat and as demanding of a co-ordinated international response is, of course, the risk from failing and unstable states. Again, the national security strategy published today proposes a new departure—and, again, it is a lesson learned from recent conflicts ranging from Rwanda and Bosnia to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. It proposes to create a stand-by international civilian capability so that for fragile and failing states, we can act quickly and comprehensively by combining the humanitarian, peacekeeping, stabilisation and reconstruction support that those countries need. In the same way as we have military forces ready to respond to conflict, we must have civilian experts and professionals ready to deploy quickly to assist failing states and to help rebuild countries emerging from conflict, putting them on the road to economic and political recovery.
	I can tell the House that Britain will start by making available a 1,000-strong UK civilian stand-by capacity that will include police, emergency service professionals, judges and trainers. I am calling on EU and NATO partners to set high and ambitious targets for their contributions to such a force.
	Between now and 2011, Britain is offering £600 million for conflict prevention, conflict resolution and stabilisation work around the world, including work in Israel and Palestine, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq and Afghanistan, Kenya and the Balkans. As we assume our presidency of the UN Security Council in May, we are proposing an appeal by the UN Secretary-General for a co-ordinated crisis recovery fund to provide immediate support where reconstruction is needed, to which Britain will be prepared to contribute.
	Specifically, because we know the importance of peace in Darfur, I am announcing today more help from Britain to train, equip and employ African troops for the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping operation. Given the importance of safeguarding peace in Somalia, I can announce that Britain will help to pay for 850 Burundian troops as part of the African Union peacekeeping force there. Given the critical importance of economic and political reconstruction complementing military action as the elected Afghan Government face down the Taliban, we are proposing an integrated civilian-military headquarters—headed by a civilian—that will now be constituted in Helmand. And in Iraq, where we have already brought electricity and water supplies to more than 1 million citizens, we are stepping up our contribution to the work of long-term economic reconstruction by supporting the Basra development commission, led for the British by the businessman, Michael Wareing, who is doing an excellent job.
	In order to maximise our contribution to all the new challenges of peacekeeping, humanitarian work and stabilisation and reconstruction, the Secretary of State for Defence is also announcing this afternoon that, as part of a wider review, the Government will now examine how our reserve forces can more effectively help with stabilisation and reconstruction in post-conflict zones around the world. With this year being the 100th anniversary of the Territorial Army, I want to pay tribute to the servicemen and women in our reserves, who provide such an essential element of our nation's defence.
	Mr. Speaker, the security strategy published today also makes clear that, as well as being able to respond to crises as they develop, we need to be able to tackle the underlying drivers of conflict and instability. Those include poverty, inequality and poor governance, where by focusing on areas where poverty breeds conflict, we have quadrupled Britain's aid budget and we are pushing for bold international action to meet the millennium development goals.
	The second set of underlying drivers is climate change and competition for natural resources, where we are leading the way in arguing for a post-2012 international agreement and for a new global fund to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change, including in the areas most under stress and therefore most likely to suffer instability as well as humanitarian disasters.
	The third drivers are disease and global pandemics, where, with the World Health Organisation, the priority is to improve early warning systems, to increase global vaccine supplies and to help put in place a more co-ordinated global response. Given the importance of building stability and countering violent extremism in the middle east and south Asia, we are also increasing the number of Foreign Office staff there by 30 per cent.
	Among all the security challenges to citizens of this country covered by the new strategy, the most serious and urgent remains the threat from international terrorism. As the head of MI5 has said, Britain is facing 30 known plots and is monitoring 200 networks and about 2,000 individuals. There have been 58 convictions for terrorism in just over a year and the Home Secretary is announcing today that we will have four regional counter-terrorism units and four regional intelligence units, significantly increasing anti-terrorism police capability in the regions. Since the events of 11 September, on suspicion of being a threat to national security or fostering extremism, 300 individuals have been prevented from entering the country. Now—backing up the unified border agency, compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals and our proposals in the Counter-Terrorism Bill that would allow us in unique circumstances to extend detention to ensure full investigation of terror threats—the Government will match stronger action against those whom we suspect of stirring up tensions with collaborative work with our European partners to strengthen the EU rules on deporting criminals—a matter that I shall discuss with President Sarkozy when he visits Britain next week.
	For action against terrorism and against organised crime, it is important to strengthen Europol and Eurojust, to ensure the rapid and secure exchange of information across borders, and to speed up the extradition of criminals and the confiscation of their assets. Starting with the United Arab Emirates, we are signing more agreements so that once the assets of a convicted criminal are seized in one country, with the assistance of the other, both countries will get a share of the proceeds.
	Our new approach to security also means local resilience against emergencies: building and strengthening local capacity to respond effectively to a range of circumstances from floods to potential terrorism incidents. That means not the old cold-war idea of civil defence, but a new form of civil protection that combines expert preparedness at local level for potential emergencies with a greater local engagement of individuals and families themselves. Next month the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government will report on additional measures that we propose for young people in colleges and universities, in prisons and working in faith communities to disrupt the promoters of violent extremism, all building on the support of the vast majority of people of all faiths and all backgrounds who condemn terrorism, terrorists and their actions.
	The national security strategy shows a Britain resolute in the face of an unstable and increasingly uncertain international security landscape. It demonstrates the lessons that we and other countries have learnt in recent years: that we must expand our policing, security and intelligence capacity—and we are doing so; that we must do more to prevent conflict by, for instance, more effective international control of arms—and we are doing so; and that we must strengthen the effectiveness of international institutions to promote stability and reconstruction, for which we have presented proposals today.
	We will always be vigilant, will never leave ourselves vulnerable, and will support and at all times and wherever necessary strengthen—as we do today—our defence and civilian support for national security.
	I commend my statement to the House.

David Cameron: Shocking? It is shocking when people interrupt all the time when I am trying to reply to the statement.
	The idea of a national security strategy is one that we welcome. The need for a national security approach is clear: the threats to our national security, from terrorism to climate change and energy security, have proliferated, and the Government must adapt to deal with them. That is why, in 2006, my party said that it was time not just for a national security strategy but for a national security council. Does the Prime Minister agree that a national security strategy will work only if it is put in place and carried out properly? To achieve that, three things must happen. First, institutions in the UK need to be properly organised to deliver a national security approach. Secondly, we need to understand fully the connections between foreign and domestic policy, and how they impact on our security. Thirdly, and vitally, any strategy will make sense only if the Government follow through and take all the necessary practical steps.
	Let me take each of those in turn. Can the Prime Minister explain why the Government have decided to set up a national security forum—another talking shop—instead of a proper national security council? Surely, a proper national security council would have dedicated staff— [ Interruption. ] Perhaps the Prime Minister will sit and wait, then he can answer the questions at the end. A proper national security council would have dedicated staff and decision-making powers. It would be at the heart of Government, with all the relevant Ministers, and it would be chaired by the Prime Minister. We do not have that; we should have it. Can he explain how a forum and an existing Cabinet committee can drive the implementation of a national security strategy across all Departments? Are we not in danger of having a talking shop and confusion?
	On the connection between foreign and domestic policy, is there going to be a properly joined-up approach? The Prime Minister talked about a single security budget, but will it genuinely cover all the areas. For instance—and I have asked him about this before—will the single security budget include special branch, which is currently funded by separate forces? The United Kingdom must retain the power, properly funded, to intervene abroad militarily when necessary, as the strategy says, but we must understand that military operations abroad have consequences for security at home. As the Joint Intelligence Committee warned, our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which we supported, increase in the short term the threat of terrorism domestically in the UK, yet we have to ask whether all the necessary action was taken domestically at the time. It is clear that the answer is no.
	That leads to the third issue—the importance of following through on the national security strategy. The Prime Minister has a number of questions to answer. First, why, despite Government statements to the contrary, has he still not banned Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is clearly a gateway group that seeks to poison young minds against our country and way of life?  [ Interruption. ] He says, "My goodness", but the previous Prime Minister said that he would ban it, so why has it not happened? Why, despite rightly preventing the preacher of hate, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, from entering Britain following our recommendation to do so, has he not followed the lead of the Irish Government and excluded Ibrahim Moussawi, a spokesman for the terrorist organisation, Hezbollah, who recently conducted a speaking tour of the UK? Why has his Government allowed public money to end up in the hands of extremist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood? Does he understand the damage done to our reputation by the perception that the UK has allowed itself to become a terrorist breeding ground and a threat to others? Why, despite the urgent need to secure our borders, does he still refuse to create a proper border police force with enforcement powers? What is holding him back from those obvious and necessary measures?
	May I end by asking the Prime Minister to begin his response by answering the following question? A national security approach will not succeed unless we learn from the mistakes that have been made in the past. In the statement, he talked about learning the lessons from conflicts such as Rwanda and Iraq. With that in mind, does he not think it is time to establish the promised inquiry into the conduct of the Iraq war? To say that that cannot be done while our forces are still in Basra is effectively to kick this into the very long grass, and it flies in the face of the fact that the United States, for instance, has held such inquiries. When he stands at the Dispatch Box, will he answer that question and tell us when we will have that inquiry, which, if we are to make a national security strategy work, is clearly needed.

Tony Lloyd: I very strongly welcome the parts in my right hon. Friend's statement about nuclear weapons, not least because the terrorists' capacity to obtain them is a serious one. In the same vein, does he recognise that biological and chemical weapons possibly pose an even bigger threat? It is probably easier for terrorists to obtain access to those weapons because of the nature of them. Will he give the same urgency to dealing with chemical and biological weapons—the so-called "poor man's nuclear weapons?"

Alan Duncan: My hon. Friend makes a crucial point. It is something that I want to expand on, ever so briefly, in a few minutes. If I may put it this way, we are involved in a game of pass the parcel. All hon. Members have in their constituencies post offices that are deemed to be shut, but if they succeed in keeping one office open, another one elsewhere will be closed. Therefore, what might appear to be a local success for one hon. Member becomes a local difficulty for another. That is one of the main problems that we face.

Alan Duncan: Because I think that it is improper for a Front Bencher to try and pre-empt and influence a Select Committee in that way. The proper way for me to speak about these matters is at the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons. That is what I am doing now, on a day when the hon. Gentleman has the opportunity to vote with the Opposition.

Martin Salter: I thank the hon. Gentleman, who will be pleased to know that I plan to make some fairly harsh criticisms of the fundamental flaws in the consultation process.
	I was attracted to the wording in the motion, but the hon. Gentleman has acknowledged that the post office network is losing a substantial amount of money. If I am to be tempted to vote for the motion, will he give an undertaking on behalf of his party to put £1.7 billion of investment into the network so that it can be sustained in a good old socialist fashion up to 2011?

Alan Duncan: The investment in the post office network is, to a large extent, already done by private individuals who take a risk and invest in their own company—the family business—so the hon. Lady's question is misdirected. Much more pertinent is the question of what those businesses can be allowed to do to enable them to expand and face a prospect of survival, rather than annihilation. We would like them to be able to take on more tasks, so that they can expand the business that they can undertake. Sub-postmasters are entrepreneurs. They want to develop new services and they want to survive on business, rather than on subsidy.

Alan Duncan: No. I will move on, as I said I would.
	First, there are the flawed access criteria. They are simple, linear, as-the-crow-flies measures. There is no appreciation in them of hills, crossroads and main roads that have to be crossed. There is no proper appreciation of the nature of a community built around the use of a post office. Furthermore, a lot of the census figures and population figures that the Post Office is using are completely out of date and unrelated to the effective market catchment area of the post offices that are threatened with closure.
	Many in this House think that the consultation is a sham. They know that the 2,500 figure has been picked out of the air. The Post Office is ramming through the closures, and if a Member of Parliament succeeds in keeping one post office open, another one will shut. Absurdly, someone who phoned up the Post Office and asked, "Excuse me, why is my village post office closing?" was told, "Because the postmaster wants to retire." "That is not true," said the caller; "I know it; I am the postmaster." What is more, community is being pitted against community, because when a post office in one village is saved, another is shut elsewhere.
	As for the post offices that are told to close, there appears to be no rationale for distinguishing between the ones that the Secretary of State always cites as having only 20 transactions a week, and those that are far more active and very popular, and which are run alongside a profitable shop and are basically viable businesses that are being forced to close for no rational economic reason whatever.
	We are calling for a freeze to the consultation. If the Government doubt whether that is possible, let us point out that, to a limited extent, they have done it already; they suddenly realised that their plans cut across the campaigning period for a local election and, indeed, a mayoral election, in which their own candidate even threatened judicial review because he is so against the policy of the Government that he is once again pretending to support. The idea that there cannot be a freeze is absurd. There has been a semi-freeze already, and we think that there should be a suspension so that all the new ingredients that have become clear over the past few months can be factored into a revised programme that could perhaps, on the same money, allow many of those post offices that are currently being forced to shut to continue.

Alan Duncan: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Today we are hearing, basically from Members on both sides of the Chamber, sorry tales of how the closure programme is being implemented in constituencies.

Richard Burden: A few moments ago, if I understood the hon. Gentleman correctly, he was arguing for more predictability in the framework in which shopkeepers operate, depending whether or not they have a post office. Part of that predictability relates to the level of subsidy that they can expect from the Government. What level of subsidy for the sub-post office network is the hon. Gentleman suggesting?

Glenda Jackson: I should like to reassure my right hon. Friend that I have no intention whatever of voting for the Conservative amendment, which comes from a party that when in government had absolutely no compunction in closing post offices, schools, hospitals, mines and heavy industry. However, there is real concern in my constituency about the proposal to close three highly efficient and consistently well-used post offices. I entirely accept that the usage of post offices has changed, but the people who use them most consistently and will be most severely affected if they are closed include the elderly, the disabled and single parents with small children. Is it not possible for the Post Office to put forward a proper cost-benefit analysis of what it is proposing as regards closures so that the consultation is genuine?

John Hutton: Postwatch is going to form part of a new, invigorated national consumer council.  [ Laughter. ] Let me remind the hon. Member for Rayleigh, in case he has forgotten, that his Front Benchers have supported that policy. I do not understand the mirth that he is concocting; it is nothing other than a concoction. This debate does not need ridiculous rhetoric and phoney arguments of the type that he is putting forward. We should have a debate about the reality, not the bogus truth and distortions that he and others are bringing into this debate.

Julian Lewis: Will the Secretary of State accept that there is genuine concern about the validity of the consultation process? The  Southern Daily Echo is a politically impartial newspaper but nevertheless felt it necessary to publish a leader entitled, "Post Office plan was a farce from the beginning", pointing out:
	"In many ways it would have been better if those in authority had simply announced their targets and then closed the book. All that this exercise has achieved is to deepen the anger amongst so many communities who now feel doubly cheated over this issue."
	One of the MPs whom the article quoted in support of that view was the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), the Secretary of State's Cabinet colleague, who is protesting about the ridiculous closure of a post office in his constituency, where the alternative, as he points out, is at the top of the steepest hill in that constituency.

James Paice: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way, albeit with reluctance. The serious point is that the consultation concerns which post offices to close, and my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) made the crucial point that if, as a result of consultation, local pressure and new figures, it is decided not to close a post office, the policy that the Secretary of State is pursuing means that somewhere that is not on the original hit list will go on to it. Will he explain to the House how that can be justified, and how the notion of the consultation being genuine can be correct if we are talking about such a trade-off? If it is possible to prove that a specific post office has a justified future and is viable, surely that should be the end of the matter.

John Hutton: Apparently, he is not saying that, though he was hinting at it. The point of our actions is keep those sub-post offices open, despite the losses that they are making, to ensure that his constituents and rural areas get a proper service.  [Interruption.] He says that we should stop going on about the losses.

John Hutton: No, I am not going to give way.
	A number of points have been made about the access criteria, and so on, which I should like briefly to deal with. The access criteria that we have set down will ensure for the first time—it is important that hon. Members appreciate that—that almost all the urban population of UK, that is 95 per cent., will be within one mile of their nearest Post Office outlet and that 95 per cent. of the rural population will be within three miles. This is the first time that such a safeguard has been provided for vulnerable consumers throughout the UK, particularly in deprived urban areas and remote areas. The additional requirement for Post Office Ltd to take account of factors such as the availability of public transport, local demographics and the impact on local economies when developing its area plans means that the criteria are more robust and should help to ensure an accessible network.

Kali Mountford: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way on that very point. Will he warn people—especially people such as Nicola Turner, the Liberal Democrat councillor in my area—to be careful not simply to stick a pin in the map and simplistically say, "I'm putting a circle of three miles around each post office," before coming up with a figure for which post offices will be closed? If we look at things in that way and do not look at the entire picture and at all the criteria, we will leave people feeling unnecessarily vulnerable and that their post offices will be closed, when that is entirely not the case.

Sarah Teather: That is not true at all. I am sure that Secretary of State will tell everyone that that is not the case when he finally adopts our policy at the end of the review.

Sarah Teather: What we want is a sustainable programme, but it is obviously for local councils to decide what they do. Of course the letter placed in the Library by the Secretary of State makes the point that the Government will stop the £150 million subsidy, so councils would then be required to put the extra money in from council tax payers. It is a difficult decision for councils; they need to know that the Government have a long-term plan to ensure sustainability. There are some good proposals for councils to work with the Post Office, but I really want something that is sustainable and not just about central Government shifting the blame and the responsibility on to local government, which causes forces local councils to pick up the costs without any kind of benefit.
	The trouble is, as I have already said, that the Government have no long-term plan to save the network. The access criteria they have devised with the Post Office would be met if we had just 7,000 post offices, which raises the spectre of further closures. Of course, the £1.7 billion that the Government boast about investing over five years already includes the £150 million a year that they had already committed—£750 million overall—and the redundancy package for sub-postmasters, which is £70 million plus some extra for central changes, taking it perhaps to £100 million. The Government have not provided the exact figures on that. By the time we have added that and taken into account general losses that the Post Office incurs each week, it is hard to see how much money would be left for real investment to modernise the Post Office.
	Additionally, post offices are steadily having every revenue option they have taken away from them, leaving the network with huge uncertainty over the future of the Post Office card account, for example. That is why we must clearly decouple Royal Mail from the post office network, to allow it to develop other business revenues with competitors. I have already mentioned having a parcel depot for other mail delivery companies. There would be all sorts of other options, but not until the brave step of uncoupling Royal Mail from the Post Office has been taken. We urgently need investment in the network. That is why we propose to part-privatise Royal Mail, raising about £2 billion for the Government to invest in upgrading the post office network. Crown post offices, in particular, desperately need investment to allow them to compete on the high street. They need refurbishment and IT investment, and their staff need extra training.

Richard Burden: Let us hope not, but I am not holding my breath. This is a serious issue, and I hope that Opposition Members will think about doing the right thing by their constituents and mine, and telling the truth about it.
	Turning to the situation in Birmingham, and the proposals that are likely to be published in June, I am pleased that criticisms that we made in the Select Committee some years ago have, in theory, been addressed by the Post Office in the access criteria that it has laid down. I say, "in theory", because the evidence is that they have not always been followed through in practice, which is something that Post Office Ltd must address. As a local MP I will only know what the proposals are, and whether there is a problem with the methodology, towards the end of the pre-consultation phase and just before the formal consultation. If and when proposals are produced, and if there is consensus about the methodology and confidence in the way in which Post Office Ltd has drawn up its plan, even if there is disagreement about its substance, the six-week consultation is probably not too bad. In fact, the National Federation of SubPostmasters says that six weeks is probably okay, if the aim is to minimise the period of sub-postmasters' uncertainty. However, problems will arise if there is not consensus about the methodology and people end up having to argue simultaneously about the methodology and the proposals themselves during that same six-week period. My message to Post Office Ltd is that it should be open with stakeholders at an earlier stage, and I do not think that that contradicts the framework that it has laid down. I do not buy all its arguments about commercial confidentiality, and I certainly do not think that they should take precedence over letting the public know the things that they need to know.
	Finally, as we approach the publication of proposals on Birmingham, access criteria will apply, as elsewhere, guaranteeing the maximum distances from post offices. That is important, and it is an improvement on existing measures. The problem that we face in Birmingham, however, does not relate to distance. Birmingham's neighbourhoods are often compact in size, but they are far from compact in population numbers. There is an average of 377.2 people—I do not know where the 0.2 comes from—per square kilometre in England. In Birmingham, the average is 3,649 people per square kilometre. Under the current post office provision, that is 7,088 residents per post office, which has resulted in unacceptable queues in a number of places in my constituency. The people queuing outside in the rain are often old, frail and vulnerable, and if Post Office Ltd further reduces the number of post offices without taking into account population density figures as well as distance, those queues will lengthen. That will hit customers even more, and it will hit the very trade that Post Office Ltd and the Government are trying to protect.
	I hope that Post Office Ltd will look at that, and that Ministers will have another word with it about taking those things into account. The framework and the access criteria do not need to change. They are not exhaustive, but they are a guide to what Post Office Ltd should take into account, and population density in urban areas is an important consideration. When Post Office Ltd draws up its plans for Birmingham, it should be open with stakeholders earlier, as there is nothing in the access criteria or the framework that prevents it from doing so. It must rethink the sequencing of involving Postwatch, local government, local MPs and the public. If there is a problem with the methodology, that will have consequences for the extent to which it sticks to the framework.

James Paice: I am grateful to be called so early in the debate. It was clear from the Secretary of State's response to the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) that the Secretary of State does not have full control of what is going on. In answer to my question about the alleged one-for-one policy—that if one was saved another had to be added to the hit list—he said it was not happening, yet he then listed a number of areas where it clearly did happen, and a number of my hon. Friends have been openly told by Post Office management that that policy does exist.
	Some remarks made by Labour Members, including the Secretary of State, serve to underline the existence of a fundamental gulf between their approach and ours—and I am sorry to say that in this context the views of the Liberal Democrats are shaped in the same mould as those of the Government. There seems to be an all-pervasive attitude that the entire debate must revolve around parties outbidding each other on how much subsidy they will give—how much they are going to guarantee. That is nonsense; that is not what the issue is about. Instead, it is about how we can best use what is available, and I shall offer some ideas on that. I should just add that, like the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden), I do not have any special pleading to make, as I do not yet know the proposals for Cambridgeshire.
	The Government's approach to this matter is marked by four characteristics. There is almost an intention to create confusion about who is responsible: is the Secretary of State driving this, or the Post Office? Whenever a problem arises, it seems that it is automatically the other's responsibility. There is also a determination to micro-manage this whole process from the centre; as is typical of this Government, there is a refusal to accept that there just might be a better way. Attached to that, there is an aura almost of infallibility: the Government think that they know best, instead of accepting that they may have got this wrong and they have failed to convince anybody of their argument.
	My remarks will come entirely from a rural perspective. I do not intend to refer to urban post offices simply because there are none in my constituency and I do not have a depth of knowledge about them. There are some 7,700 rural post offices, and about 65 per cent. of all rural communities have a post office. By comparison, only 10 per cent. of rural communities have a branch of a bank. That is an important distinction, because it shows that in most rural communities the post office is the only local "financial institution".
	Of course, we have to accept that the majority of post offices are loss-making from a purely Post Office perspective—it would be unrealistic to deny that—but we should be looking for solutions. Before coming to that, however, I wish to emphasise the community and social role of a post office. As has been said, it is for many people a gathering place. It is also often combined with a shop and each part of the business gains from the other; attention has rightly been drawn to the amount of money people spend in the shop if they have just drawn money from the post office. Post offices are, of course, the outlets for the Post Office card account. I am sure I am not the only hon. Member who has received a lot of letters from people complaining that British Telecom now charges £4.50 when people do not pay their phone bill by direct debit. That demonstrates to me the number of people who still want to do everything by cash. That is another important reason why post offices are important, as is people's access to their benefits or pensions through them.
	We have a policy, as, I believe, does the whole House, of wanting to encourage people to work increasingly from or close to their home to reduce travel. That again provides a need for rural businesses to have access to a convenient post office. Even things such as eBay, which is all-pervasive these days, generate more and more business.
	The final point to make on the community and social role relates to the access criteria—the belief that the objective should be that virtually everybody is within 3 miles of a post office. We are talking about that distance as the crow flies, but in many rural areas the real distance may be double that—at least 6 miles, if not more—and it may be down narrow lanes, across motorways and so on. The proposal will certainly lead to far more car usage. A few weeks ago, I asked the Secretary of State a parliamentary question as to what assessment had been made of increased car usage and carbon emissions as a result of the proposals. Unsurprisingly, the answer came back that no such assessment had been made. I simply add that people who do not have a car will face a 2-mile walk—a 4-hour walk there and back—and that making such a journey is a near impossibility for somebody who is elderly and vulnerable.

James Paice: I do, of course, agree. I am sure that all hon. Members who represent constituencies where the consultation process has been taking place will fully understand that the way in which the consultation and the closure process is being carried out involves seriously bad practice.
	My main criticism of this whole sorry saga is that it is a top-down-driven decision. Of course some post offices are very badly run—we have all been to see them, so we cannot deny that. The simple reality is that they could be more successful if they were under different management. Many of them will never be profitable in a purely commercial sense, which is one reason why I have just discussed the social aspects.
	However, we ought to help and encourage the better ones to succeed, and the consultation appears to ignore that approach. Some excellent and apparently profitable post offices are being closed. Despite what the Prime Minister said earlier today about the post offices that have only 16 or 20 customers a week—a tiny minority of post offices have such a low level of usage—the reality is that many of them will remain open because of the access criteria and the fact that they are located in the most remote areas.
	What should be happening is that the Post Office should simply set delivery standards and requirements of a sub-post office and tell people how much they will get paid for the work; the figure should be one that does not incur a loss for the Post Office. That would allow the sub-postmaster or sub-postmistress to make their own judgments about whether they can operate on that basis. It may depend on what other business they attach to it. Many may say that because they value their community and own the local shop or pub, they are happy to accept a small loss, because the village needs a post office. They may want to talk to local authorities—we have heard of the example of Essex—or other voluntary bodies and the local community. It is not a question of accepting continuous losses—no Government should do that—but of letting the individuals decide whether they can run a business on the basis of the standards and finances laid down by the Post Office, including perhaps subsidising it from other activities.
	All the discussion about new business for the Post Office—the Secretary of State went on and on about it this afternoon—is all focused on what is being decided by the Post Office nationally. It is the Post Office in London that is deciding to look out for insurance business, currency exchange or whatever. That is top-down thinking. Instead, the entrepreneurial sub-postmaster should be able to look for his own business. He may want some help from the Post Office nationally, if that can be done, but he should be set free to find other forms of business, perhaps in conjunction with local authorities, that could be related to the post office activity and help to make his business more viable. That is why I wholly condemn the arrangement that will prevent those closing with compensation from providing similar services through other providers. It is true that such constraints are often applied for a year or two in commercial law when someone ceases an activity; but we are not talking about purely commercial situations. The Minister fully accepted that many post offices play a vital social role and the whole issue of commerciality should be pushed to one side, in terms of allowing those businesses to offer PayPal or other services. The issue is access to public services, especially in our rural areas, and is accompanied by the issues of the quality of life and social gain.
	We need a much more flexible approach to the network to accommodate post offices that fail, or what happens when a sub-postmaster wishes to retire or sell up. The system should facilitate a replacement in those circumstances, and that should be self-evident if we want a comprehensive network. We need to review urgently the planning and rating systems to encourage multiuse of our premises. I know that there are good examples of pubs, churches and village halls providing post office services, but they experience difficulties, including in the ratings sector, that need to be considered carefully. In many cases, the post office is part of the only remaining shop in the village and if the post office element is closed, the shop may go down too, especially with the restraint on trade that I have mentioned. The village is then left without any service. The implications for that on the need to travel, car usage, carbon emissions, and the sheer difficulty and harassment for individuals, are obvious.
	If the Government really care about the post office network, and do not take just a purely mechanistic view of it, the first thing that they must do is get a grip of what the Post Office is doing. Other hon. Members have raised the threats to sub-postmasters and mistresses who face closure. They have been told that if they get early information that their post offices are on the hit list, they must not tell anyone; otherwise, they will not get their compensation. This is all blackmail. It is wrong, and the Government have to get a grip of it. They could do other things. They could make it a condition that the lottery provider ought to enable all post offices, at least in rural areas, to have a terminal. They could say to the Post Office, "Just tell sub-postmasters and mistresses what you want from them, what the services are and how much you are prepared to pay. Let them decide whether they can take it on on that basis and let them go out and look for extra business."
	The Government could do all those things. They could reverse the whole process to a bottom-up system, but they will not. That was clear from what the Secretary of State said. No one in government really understands our rural communities. The Government believe in central decision making and that no individual can be trusted to make the right decisions. The main reason that they will not do these things is that they would have to admit that they are wrong.
	The Government have continued to waste billions of pounds with little to show for it, yet when they have a chance to do something good for no extra money they refuse to do so. It is typical of a Government who have had their day.

Ian Cawsey: It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice). We normally end up debating the future of pigs, so it is nice to move on to another subject, even if it still begins with the letter p.
	When the announcement was first made some months ago, I was a Government Whip. It is good to be able finally to stand up in the Chamber and make some comments about how the decision has affected Brigg and Goole. I am reminded of the first time I stood for election in 1992 in the old Brigg and Cleethorpes seat—unsuccessfully, I hasten to add—against the Tory MP Michael Brown, who is now my good friend. One of the big issues was post office closures. It seems almost like groundhog day; here we are, still discussing it—[Hon. Members: "More pigs!"] There will be no more pig analogies. That is the end of it.
	Thousands of post offices have been closed under Conservative and Labour Administrations. They would probably be closed under a Liberal Democrat Administration, too, if there ever was one. As the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) candidly said, we cannot control everything in the way that we would perhaps like to.
	Let me tell the House something about the experience in Brigg and Goole and how it has been handled. We are at the end of the process now and we were in the first tranche that was announced. When the announcement was made, it was proposed that Westfield avenue post office in Goole, which is an urban post office, would be closed, and that the rural post offices in Reedness, Wroot, West Butterwick and Eastoft would change to outreach. We then went into the consultation.
	A lot of hon. Members have said that the consultation was a complete sham. I would say that it was a curate's egg in some respects. It is very difficult to understand how some of the decisions were finally reached, even though some of them were definitely improvements on the original proposals.

Stephen Hammond: Whether the consultation was a sham or not, did not the hon. Gentleman's constituents have the same experience as mine? First, some of the rationale that the Post Office put forward in its explanation was factually wrong. Secondly, the process was truncated into a shorter time than is usual for such consultation procedures.

Ian Cawsey: I understand exactly where the hon. Gentleman is coming from.
	What transactions are undertaken in post offices? All hon. Members will recognise that question from their discussions with the Post Office. What one is told—on a confidential basis only—when one asks is that the number of transactions that post offices carry out is very low. I was shocked when I found out how low the number is: as a local person, I had thought that it would be much higher.
	There is no doubt that a significant change has taken place. Some of it is due to demographic changes, and no firm can lose 4 million customers in a relatively short period without such changes being part of the reason. In addition, people are making different decisions about how they get their pensions and benefits. It is worth bearing in mind that 80 per cent. of pensioners had stopped getting their pensions from post offices before Labour was even elected. The demographic change is therefore not new, but has been going on for some time.
	I picked up a petition at one of my local post offices that appeared to have been signed by everyone in the village. I said to the sub-postmaster that he had done extraordinarily well, but he replied, "Yes, Ian, but if everyone who signed the petition used the post office I would not need it." That is another common problem.
	Questions have been asked about the adequacy or otherwise of the Post Office's management. I sometimes think that they have created problems for themselves, and that they continue to do so. For example, I said earlier that I was very pleased that the office at Reedness was to stay in the shop where it is presently located. The local sub-postmistress is willing to work more hours, but to do so she requires a relatively small amount of IT and a laptop computer. Without that equipment, she is forced to rely on the time that the person from the main post office can give, but the Post Office has refused to provide it.
	The Post Office is making week-by-week, month-by-month savings on the hours that the Reedness sub-postmistress works, but it will not meet the one-off capital cost involved in giving her the kit that will allow her to work extra, voluntary hours while her shop is open. I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Minister for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs on the Front Bench, as I have raised this matter with him previously. I hope that he is able to help.
	I turn now to the provision of television licences. Why did the BBC decide not to let post offices sell the stamps that people use to buy licences? The answer is that the tender from PayPoint was £100 million less than the one offered by the Post Office. Why was it so much lower, and why has no one ever challenged the Post Office about whether it was serious and credible in its attempt to get the business?
	John Taylor of the Rawcliffe Bridge post office told me that he wanted to install a PayPoint terminal when the decision about television licence stamps was taken but that he was told that he could not do so. I understand that the arrangements are more flexible now, but when the changes were all taking place he was told that he could not do it. PayPoint found other locations and that is not going to change now.
	The same sub-postmaster said to me, "If you look at the back of a British Telecom bill, where it sets out how you can pay, it no longer mentions the post office." People can still pay through their post office, but it does not say so on the bill. I took that up with British Telecom, which simply said, "We're never going to stop people paying through the post office—obviously, we have links with the Post Office historically—but it is the most expensive way for us to collect our money from customers, and we ain't going to advertise it, although we'll continue to accept payments through the post office."
	Only today, a constituent who wanted to pay her water bill told me that she would be charged more at the post office than at the local garage or the local shop. It makes me think: why is the Post Office creating these barriers to business? The report of the Select Committee on Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, which has been referred to, said that poor management has been a factor over the years, but that there was greater confidence in the people who are in place now. I really hope that that is true, but we are still waiting to see.
	Local authorities can and should play a role, and I welcome some of the recent developments. My area is covered by two local authorities, one of which is North Lincolnshire council. When the announcement was first made, all that time ago, I had a conversation with Liz Redfern, who was then leader of the council. I asked whether there was something that the council could do. It is fair to say that I met with a polite response but not a great deal of interest. However, in May last year, North Lincolnshire was the only council in the country that went from being Conservative to Labour; I am happy about that, although I am not happy that only one council changed in that way, but at least the council concerned was my local council. Mark Kirk, who is now the leader of the council, is in discussion with its offices on how they can work with local post offices. Perhaps there can be outreach to the villages, too, so that local government services there use the post offices, boost the number of hours, and so make the post offices more viable.
	My other local council is the Tory East Riding of Yorkshire council, and I have to say that on many issues, including the one that we are discussing, it is very enlightened. Stephen Parnaby, the leader, is doing a good job there. We were county councillors together. He is a good bloke, and he will be pleased that he is in  Hansard. He came up with the idea, which his cabinet supported, of the local council becoming a corporate sub-postmaster. If the Post Office approves the idea, the council will be able to deliver post office branch services via its mobile libraries, its customer service centres, which already exist, and village schools. That is a way in which local authorities can make a big difference.
	The council does not pay the tax on its vehicles at post offices, but in the council's defence, it can be said that there is a Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency office right next door to County hall, so it is probably difficult to justify doing so. Again, that is a simple thing that councils can do: they can get all their fleet taxed at local post offices. All hon. Members should ask their local councils whether they do that.
	I want to mention sub-postmasters. I welcome the package and the fact that, this time, sub-postmasters get something if they have to go, because no such provision was in place before, and that was a mistake. However, what about those who want to go? At least one sub-postmaster in my area—I will not say who it is, because that would set another hare running—really wanted to be let go, under the consultation, but he has been told that that cannot happen. What happens to those people when the process finishes? We need answers to that. We should always remember that in this debate, we are talking about the future and livelihoods of the people who run our post offices.
	We are ahead of most areas; frankly, we are at the end. Goole post office is closed, and the Wroot and Reedness services are staying in the shop. We are trying to work with the council to boost services in those outreach locations. I was speaking to the sub-postmasters in West Butterwick, Eastoft and Wrawby, and for all sorts of reasons that are not the business of the House, none of them is seeking any further involvement with the Post Office. They have made their decisions about what they want to do with their lives, and they want to move on. Frankly, there would be no benefit to Brigg and Goole from the suspension being proposed tonight. Indeed, it would mean a further period of uncertainty for the sub-postmasters concerned.
	We maintain a network across our area, which is big and rural. I remain as determined as ever to work with the two councils in my area, which are of different political persuasions, to ensure that that remains the case, and to ensure that, despite the odds, we have a vibrant post office network for the future.

Michael Clapham: I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and he raises an important aspect. Because of the opaqueness, there is no connection between the post offices that will be affected by the process. The situation must be clarified.

John Randall: I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham), although his view of Postwatch as a robust organisation does not reflect my experience. Several hon. Members spoke to Postwatch about closures in London, and it seemed to lie on its back and wait to be tickled by the Post Office. It appeared simply to accept everything.
	I shall be brief because I am aware of the number of Members who want to speak. We are considering a highly emotive subject. In my constituency and those of many hon. Friends and colleagues, it causes as much concern as any other local matter in recent times. Two post offices in my constituency are down for closure. My constituency is small, so that is a high number and I know both post offices well. Without going too far into individual merits—we could all do that—I will make a robust response to the consultation about Moorfield road and Uxbridge Common Park Road post offices because they are as much a part of the community as the post offices in hon. Friends' rural communities. In suburbia, a parade of shops is exactly like village shops. Moorfield road is on a council estate and the post office is a vital part of the community. Masses of people have written to me about it. I agree that it is not good enough just to get a petition going and to try to make what we can out of the situation. I want to be pragmatic. I want to ensure that my constituents still get what they want.
	In Uxbridge, we have had the experience of a Crown post office being moved into a branch of WH Smith—the experience has been shared elsewhere—although the move has not happened yet. We had a consultation period, during which I and members of the public raised serious concerns—the move is to the first floor, and we were worried about disabled access—and we received assurances. The post office will open next month and we will be watching it very carefully. However, the important thing is that those services will still be available. I hope that the post office will give the same service, if not a better one.
	I want to speak as a retailer. As many hon. Members know, my family business has been in operation for a long time, and we have had to deal with through changing patterns of what people want in the way of services. Anyone who has been in business for 120 years has to adapt. I therefore accept that things have changed and that that has not been all for the bad. Earlier we talked about eBay, for example, which has meant a lot of people wanting to post things that they are selling on.
	A few years ago, we started selling stamps in my shop, when the Post Office allowed us to. They proved so popular that people started arriving with parcels that they wanted us to send, but of course we could not do so, because we are allowed only to sell first and second-class stamps, which is fine. However, I thought it would be to open a sub-post office in my shop. I was not a Member of Parliament at the time, so I was not thinking entirely of the community; I was thinking of business considerations. My shop is big enough, and a sub-post office would have brought lots of people in. However, I was told that I would not be able to have one. What amazed me, however, was that I would have been paid to have one. At that stage, I thought that I would have pay to get the franchise and have that excellent brand—the Post Office—in my shop.
	I understand that it is important for a sub-post office to exist in some communities, but that that might not be economical. However, I cannot help feeling that the Post Office has certain services to offer.

Michael Jabez Foster: Yes, I do believe that there might be alternatives. Indeed, there might be other methodologies that could save some of the post offices that are now under threat. The Essex option—and perhaps an East Sussex option—could play that part. However, all such options would require funding.
	The fact is that it is this Labour Government who have provided record funding for Post Office services— £150 million, as we have already heard, on a regular and ongoing basis for subsidising social need and £1.7 billion over the five-year period. Despite what has been said today, I am still unsure whether the Conservative Opposition are pledging that amount of money. What I am sure about is that they are not pledging anything more than that, but more will certainly be required if we are to support the sort of motion that the Conservatives have proposed today. They say no closures should happen, but some post offices will still have to close. I am not cherry-picking here and saying that our post offices should not close while everyone else's should, but it is surely a fact that some post offices will be unviable. That must be the case. Suggesting, as the Conservative motion does, that there should be no closures at all is unrealistic and therefore purposeless. For that reason, I will not support it.
	Having said that, I do not believe that the present consultation or the closure programme has been right. I want to impress on the Minister for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs that other things could have happened and I certainly want the next round of considerations to be dealt with very differently.
	The first thing to establish is Conservative policy. It appeared—I say "appeared", but I am not sure what tense I should be using—to be that only profitable post offices should be retained. In and of itself, however, that is faulty. If we simply maintain profitable post offices, 4,000 or thereabouts will remain throughout the country, but they will all be in urban areas, able to compete alongside each other while still making profits, but at the expense of other more socially deprived areas. That does not amount to a comprehensive universal service across the nation. For that reason, the premise must be wrong.

Andy Reed: As my hon. Friend knows, the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) said during those earlier exchanges that he would look at the same number of closures. Many Labour Members have examined the Conservatives' position and feel, like my hon. Friend, that it offers nothing new. It is a disgrace to put it forward by suggesting that it contains something new. The Conservatives would provide no new money, they are making no further promises and their approach is disingenuous to constituents, whose hopes may have been raised.

Martin Salter: I am aware of the battle royal in Brent between the political parties, and I could never be as horrible to the Lib Dems as my hon. Friend is, but I certainly acknowledge that they will say one thing in one place and something else in another.
	In Reading, West, we went through an especially tough time in 2004 with the network reinvention programme. Other hon. Members will also bear the scars of that time. In my constituency, we faced the proposed closure of branches in Lyon square, Whitley Wood, Beecham road and the Meadway—all areas of west Reading. But with the strong support of Postwatch and the engagement of the local community, and by focusing on two of the four branches that were clearly pushing at the envelope of the published criteria, we were able to achieve at least one success: we were able to stop the closure of the Whitley Wood branch in one of the most deprived parts of my constituency. While I was not happy to see three post offices close, I accepted that at least the process had some integrity.
	That was in 2004. Fast forward to 2008. One of the arguments that allowed the Post Office to go ahead with the closure of the Meadway branch—I realise that the names will mean little to other hon. Members—was the fact that there was another branch within one mile, in Wantage road, also in my constituency, and we had to accept that argument. How surprised was I to find, in 2008, that as part of the current programme the Wantage Road branch was scheduled for closure, along with a branch at Lower Tilehurst in Kentwood Hill. Like any good constituency MP, I sprang into action. We have all done it, and other hon. Members will do it when it happens in their constituencies. I raised the petitions, lobbied Postwatch and tested the proposals against the criteria. Once again, I thought we had a case on at least one of the branches.
	Let this be a warning to everybody engaged in this process. I wrote to the regional chair of Postwatch, having measured the distances, considered the deprivation indices, and examined the promises that had been made before about additional counters to deal with queuing as a result of the previous closures in 2004. I wrote:
	"The criteria which the Post Office use to determine whether or not to close a local post office is whether people have another post office within one mile, except in areas of significant deprivation. In these areas post offices can remain open if the residents live less than a mile from another branch. The Dee Road estate is in part served by the Wantage Road Post Office and significant data is available from Reading Borough Council to demonstrate that this is an area of deprivation. Should Wantage Road be closed, some areas of Dee Road Estate"—
	that deprived estate in my constituency—
	"would be 1.2 or 1.3 miles away from their nearest post office."
	In addition, it was proposed that a post office at the bottom of an extremely steep hill with an intermittent bus service would be closed. The replacement post office was already overcrowded, with many pensioners queuing out into the street. We had been promised additional counters in 2004, but they did not appear—certainly not as regularly as we wanted.
	We challenged the fact that no account had been taken of additional housing that was being built in the local community, with another 400 new chimney pots coming on stream—another 400 potential customers. I believe that we had put together a strong and powerful argument and I was confident, as I was in 2004, that we could deliver—or save—at least one of those post offices.
	Our consultation closed on 31 January. There were reasons to be cheerful on 15 February, because the letter arrived from Postwatch. In my view, it could not have been clearer. It said: "Postwatch has very serious reservations about the consequences of the closure of the Wantage Road post office. We have received numerous concerns from customers and the local MP"—that is me—"with particular reference to Postwatch's responsibility"—this is important—"for vulnerable individuals and communities. We ask Post Office Ltd to reconsider this closure proposal, affecting as it does a relatively deprived area characterised by low incomes, high unemployment and a high proportion of social and special needs housing." We had it in black and white. It was not unreasonable to assume that that would be taken to review and that we had a good chance of saving that post office.
	The reviews were then announced, and it turned out that Postwatch did not mean what it said. Although it expressed serious reservations and had asked for reconsideration, it had failed to trigger the formal process. The lesson for hon. Members is that if they get Postwatch on their side—and they need to—they should please make sure that it means what it says. Weasel words alone will not save a branch in any of our constituencies.
	Finally, throughout the process the local Liberals remained silent. We do not have too many of them in west Reading, so there was no danger of their colonising the issue. The local Conservatives were noisy but spectacularly irrelevant. As I said earlier, my opposite number, the Tory candidate, launched a campaign a month before the publication of the closure programme to save three branches in Southcote, Purley and Hildens drive that were never at risk and were never going to be at risk. Yet he and his campaign failed even to lodge an objection with Postwatch or to engage in the campaign to help those branches that were earmarked for closure. This is the sort of irresponsible behaviour that has been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Ms Butler), and means that local people, pensioners and disabled people who rely on their post office to provide vital services end up frightened and distressed.
	Scaremongering and unnecessarily frightening pensioners in my constituency is no substitute for good, honest campaigning. The dishonesty, incoherence and hypocrisy in the Conservative motion are no substitute for honest politics and there is no case for going into the Lobby tonight for the Conservative party.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I judge that on such an occasion it might be more important for hon. Members to be able to get something on the record rather than to have the full 12 minutes, so I propose with immediate effect to reduce the time limit to seven minutes. I hope that on that basis we should nearly get there.

Nick Gibb: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that important intervention. He will make a great advocate for London, and I wish him all the very best.
	It is clear that the Post Office has failed to take into account high concentrations of the elderly and very elderly. The very elderly tend to have abandoned the use of a car, due to failing eyesight or poor general health, and they struggle to make their way to their local shops and post office on foot, by wheelchair or by scooter. Travelling to the next nearest post office will be impossible for many elderly residents. The next nearest post office to Craigweil is at Rose Green, and getting there would mean walking nearly a mile along a route parts of which have no footpath.
	Residents in the beach area of Littlehampton will find themselves having to use the main Crown post office in Littlehampton if the beach branch is closed. As well as being difficult to get to from there, Littlehampton's Crown post office is notorious for its lengthy and time-consuming queues; that is consistent with other Crown post offices around the country. The Select Committee said:
	"Queuing times at Crown Offices were longer than in most franchised operations (a consideration for frailer customers)".
	If the Beach branch is to close, I hope that Post Office Ltd will give an undertaking to put extra staff in Crown post offices and provide seating and help for elderly and disabled customers.
	Public transport in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton is very poor. Many of the bus services that do exist are infrequent and depend on subsidies from West Sussex county council; those are often reviewed and services are often withdrawn. If the Hawthorn road and South Bersted branches closed, a large area of residential Bognor Regis would be devoid of any post office branch. Part of that area encompasses two of the most deprived wards in west Sussex; only one third of residents in Pevensey, for example, own a car. Given poor public transport, there is great reliance on post offices remaining local. Closing those two branches would present real difficulties for many residents in the area.
	Like many towns in the area, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton have grown from smaller communities that have merged over time. The Beach Town area of Littlehampton was a separate town until development joined it to the rest of Littlehampton. The small parade of shops in that area is a community in itself. If we lose the post office branch run by Bharti and Raj Shah at the back of the grocery store, and if the grocery store goes as well, we will lose the hub of a community in Littlehampton. The same will happen if we lose the post office in Craigweil, which has a parade of shops near the sea and which is cut off from other parts of Bognor Regis. If we lose the shop and the post office, which is run by Barbara and Robin Doe, the whole hub of that community will go as well.
	In conclusion, the proposed closure plan for the post office network of Bognor Regis and Littlehampton involves a third of the branches—almost double the national figure of 18 per cent. The area has a much higher proportion of the elderly and very elderly, who are the section of the population most dependent on the existence of a locally sited post office. Although the Post Office will have recorded the proportion of retired people living in the area, the closure programme has not taken into account the numbers of very elderly people. I urge the House to support the Opposition motion this evening, to suspend the compulsory closure of the sub-post office network.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: As always, my hon. Friend makes pertinent points on behalf of his constituents. He looks after them very well in this House, and he has done so again on this occasion. I entirely agree with what he said.
	The closures have resulted in the biggest single constituency campaign that I have dealt with in 16 years as a Member of Parliament. I have received more than 500 letters, all of which have been summarised, and 12 separate representations had been made to Post Office Ltd at the end of the closure of the consultation period at the beginning of this week, with copies sent to the Minister. I have organised eight well-attended public meetings, and we had a march in the centre of Cirencester at which 500 residents turned up to demonstrate about the fact that if a vast number of extra people have to go to the Crown post office in Cirencester, it will not be able to cope.
	I want to provide the Minister with a brief rural tour of the Cotswolds to demonstrate some of the problems with the consultation, beginning with the very northern and southern edges of my constituency, on the Worcestershire-Warwickshire boundary in the case of Weston-sub-Edge, and on the Wiltshire boundary in the case of Meysey Hampton. The problem there is that because the consultation was done for different areas in different parts of the country, and neither Worcestershire, Warwickshire nor Wiltshire has yet been reviewed, residents are having their post office closed without knowing what the future of the post office in the adjoining county is going to be. I believe that the Government and the Post Office have deliberately staggered the closure programme on that basis to avoid the national outcry that would otherwise take place.
	I should like now to go to the most rural part of my constituency—Temple Guiting and Guiting Power. Those two villages expected that one of their post offices would close and were completely taken aback when they both closed. One of those post offices has just two hours of outreach. I have made representations to the Post Office and to the Minister about the alterations that could be made to that outreach. Will he comment on how it is going to be funded, how long it is likely to last, and what provisions will be there to review it once it is in place and we find that it is not working as well as it might? Those two villages will be joined by residents from Longborough, who are extremely vociferous about their closure, and Blockley, where they are trying to form a co-operative village shop in order to keep their post office open.
	In the highly likely event that any of the residents affected by all five closures find themselves needing a post office out of outreach hours, they will be forced to go to Bourton-on-the-Water, Stow or Moreton-in-Marsh. I defy the Minister, in the middle of a summer afternoon with a large influx of visitors, to find a car-parking space within two miles of those post offices.
	I come to two other rural post offices—those of Sherborne and Aldsworth. One of the young schoolchildren in Sherborne managed to get 200 names on a petition in just two hours, such is the strength of feeling in that village.
	In the limited time left to me, I want to talk about Cirencester, which currently has three branches: one Crown post office, and two sub-post offices. The two sub-post offices are Stratton, which serves 5,400 residents, and the Beeches, which serves 12,300 residents. In the case of Stratton, at my well-attended public meeting of 250 people—I hope that the Minister will bear this in mind—the sub-postmaster, John Lafford, reported two amazing facts. These are on the public record. In January alone, he had a turnover of £468,000—in just one month—and he was offered a payment of £100,000 if he took the post office closure payment, but he wants to stay open because he enjoys serving the community. What a way to go about a closure programme. The Beeches serves 12,300 residents, with another 750 new houses about to be built, but it is scheduled for closure. Surely the Government can think of a more sensible programme than closing such profitable post offices, which is really the politics of the madhouse.
	If the closures go ahead, and the two closest post offices to Cirencester—Rendcomb and Colesbourne—are also closed, a population of 19,000 people in the town of Cirencester and the surrounding 21 villages, across 100 square miles, will be left with one inadequate Crown post office. I do not know of anywhere in the country where such a monstrous proposal is in place. I ask the Minister if he will seriously reconsider the proposals, particularly in the case of Cirencester.
	I end on this note. Much has been made in this debate about the services that have been run down in our post offices, but I want to ask the Minister what positive proposals he has to introduce new services. I think that I was one of the first Members to mention the idea of having a broadband connection in every post office. If such a connection were provided, a huge amount of information would be available to all my constituents. It is amazing that even elderly constituents are becoming more computer literate every day—a surprising factor. With a little invention, the Post Office could offer a lot of other things. It could offer ATMs, which could be further refined so that they were compatible with the Post Office benefit card; benefit claimants could then draw cash from their own post office. A lot of services could be provided by the Post Office, and as other hon. Members have said, it should be much more free in the amount of services it allows sub-postmasters and mistresses to offer.
	In closing, I say to the Minister that the consultation is flawed. I am not a luddite. The system cannot remain exactly as it is, and it needs some rationalisation, but the way in which the Government have dealt with the consultation is flawed. It is wrong, and the wrong branches are being closed. I ask him to think again, particularly about the two branches in Cirencester.

Kate Hoey: I shall be very brief. Any member of the public reading the Opposition's motion would find it strange that anyone could vote against it, particularly those who are concerned about their own post offices and what is happening in their constituencies. The suspension of the compulsory closure of sub-post offices while all the issues are reassessed is common sense, and no one should feel that they are being disloyal to their party or the Government in voting for it.
	All of us feel strongly about the closure programme, and, as many hon. Members have said, this Parliament is ultimately responsible for the matter. I would have preferred a Government motion calling for such a suspension, which we could have supported, but it is an Opposition one, and I shall support it. As chair of the all-party group on post offices, I have done everything in my constituency absolutely by the book. London is in the middle of its very short consultation period—I am not sure whether that makes a lot of difference. A suspension would give us more time to opposed the closure of particular sub-post offices. I have gone through all the criteria for my Lambeth Walk post office on Vauxhall street. I have measured everything, had Postwatch down and held a public meeting. The local community are totally involved and supportive.
	Huge amounts of regeneration are coming into our area about which Royal Mail and the Post Office did not know. We are presenting all the information, including the deprivation figures and the fact that there are eight sheltered homes within a few hundred yards of the post office. It would be a disgrace if, under the existing criteria, the post office did not stay open. I will wait and see.
	I have done everything by the book and I am sure that that applies to many colleagues. By voting for the motion, we send a little signal, which tells the Government that they are responsible for determining the figures; an arbitrary figure has been plucked out of the air.
	Today, all sorts of ideas have been expressed about possible changes, including legal action that might happen in London, proposals that Essex and other local authorities have made, and the Government using the Post Office more and instructing the BBC to allow television licences to be bought in post offices. Many things can be done, but we need more time. The motion is sensible and I hope that many of my colleagues will join me in the Lobby tonight.

David Evennett: I am pleased that we are holding a debate on a subject of considerable concern to my constituents and I am glad that I can make a brief contribution to it.
	I was disappointed in the Secretary of State's speech, which failed to deal with the genuine concerns of all our constituents about the changes in the postal service. I congratulate my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State on a constructive and logical approach to examining those issues and highlighting the flaws in the action that is being taken.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) made a speech that I strongly supported, which covered most of the issues that face suburban and Greater London post office closures. We hope that the Government will listen today and propose a rethink. We also hope that the Post Office will suspend the closure programme to consider the possible alternatives. For example, we have discussed Essex county council's proposal, which could ameliorate the problems.
	In the past few years in Bexleyheath and Crayford, we have lost many of our sub-post offices—in Barnehurst, Lesnes Abbey, Brampton and on the boundary between Barnehurst and Collier's ward. Today, we are threatened with yet another closure in the Brampton ward of my constituency. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge, we have experienced the closure of a popular and busy post office and its relocation to the upstairs of WH Smith in the centre of the town. It has just opened, and we were genuinely worried about the relocation because of the lifts, the staff, the location and mobility problems for those who are disabled or have children in pushchairs and prams. We will wait and see how it works out.
	I want to highlight the Brampton road post office, which is threatened. Its closure is subject to consultation. It opens for 51 hours a week and completes between 750 and 990 transactions a week at its two service positions. It has level access, provides euros on demand and has an external ATM facility. There is unrestricted parking and a bus stop 100 yd away. Many of those who use the post office are pensioners who do not own a car and do not find mobility easy. The closure of the branch would cause genuine hardship to people in and around the area that I represent in Brampton. There are alternative branches, but they are a considerable distance away—in Long lane, which is more than a mile away, and Wroughton road, which is two thirds of a mile away. They are open for less time and do not have easy access via buses.
	On Friday 22 February, we held some meetings in my local office with representatives of Post Office Ltd to discuss the proposed closure. I made strong points about the disadvantage it would cause local people. Of course we understand that the Government have been responsible for reducing the Post Office's opportunities to serve the community—that has been well discussed this afternoon, so I will not repeat those points.
	One of the issues raised by Melanie Corfield, who is head of external relations for the south-east, was the opportunities for new products that the Post Office wants to promote. One of those, which was on its business plan, was financial services. The Post Office extolled the new bond backed by the Bank of Ireland, which it hoped people would buy, thereby creating new development services for it. However, I made the point, strongly and forcefully, that it was difficult for people to get to post offices and therefore difficult for them to use the new services. If post offices are not in communities, there will obviously be a disincentive for people who do not have cars or easy mobility to take up those new opportunities.
	There are serious concerns about closing branches without considering the needs of local communities. Many local businesses are also concerned about the loss of a facility that they use. I had meetings with many local shopkeepers and businesses that were great users of the services offered by the Brampton road branch. They were concerned about how their businesses would suffer if the branch closed.

David Heath: We learned three weeks ago how many closures Somerset would face. The figures are very clear: in the present Somerset county council area, 30 will close, with another seven downgraded; in the historic county of Somerset, a further 18 will close, making a total of 55 closures across Somerset. Anyone who wants to know what villages are involved could find them in my early-day motion 1036.
	I shall concentrate on the seven direct closures in my constituency—in Bayford, Bower Hinton, Holcombe, Keinton Mandeville, Kingsdon, Sparkford and Yeovilton—and two that will be replaced by a van service in Charlton Horethorne and North Cadbury. I feel that I have been fighting the same campaign for 20 or more years—in the House, previously as a county councillor or before that as someone involved in local community politics. It seems to me that we are seeing a constant reduction in the post office network.
	I know that there were 3,500 closures under the Conservative Government, but I think that the main reason for that was neglect. Now it is happening by design: we are deliberately closing down large parts of the rural post office network. I hear Labour Members talk of the "stability" of the network. It is a strange sort of stability that closes 6,500 sub-post offices. At medical school I used to be told that there was a difference between stability and morbidity. What the Government are proposing is the stability of a corpse. Through a process of bullying and moving business away from post offices, they have created circumstances in which they can say that those post offices are not profitable and must be closed down. I thought that we had won the battle for rural post offices back in 2002. How wrong I was—that was only a temporary lull before the storm that we now face.
	We know from what has happened so far that public opinion is not enough. We can collect all the signatures that we like. Four million people signed a petition against post office closures, but it did not mean a thing. We can organise local petitions—every parish council in my constituency signed a petition that I presented to the House—and they do not mean a thing. All our local petitions and letters do not mean a thing, because the Government have decreed that the closures will go ahead.
	I do not think the Government understand why we fight so strongly for local post offices. There are all the social reasons which we have heard already today. We have heard about the people who do not have the comfortable option of getting into their second Volvo to drive to the next town because they do not have that second Volvo, or even the first, and could not drive it if they had it because they are elderly or infirm. Those people cannot find a substitute for the local post office. They do not want their money to be paid into a bank account, because they have never worked on the basis of a bank account. I think the yuppie Ministers have forgotten that there are people in this country who still budget on a week-by-week basis with cash in hand. That is the way those people want to stay, and they need their sub-post offices.
	There is, for instance, the community aspect of post offices. The post office is the centre of many village communities, and in many instances it is all that we have left. It is not just postal services that are affected, but all the other activities that are centred on the post office, which is often the last shop in the village. I have been considering the effect of the planned closures in my constituency. As a result of the closure in Bower Hinton, people will have to walk two to three miles to Martock, down a steep hill which they will have to climb up when they return. The post office is the last shop in Bower Hinton, so that is in danger as well. When those people arrive in Martock they will find a very successful little post office, but one with permanent queues which is unable to provide any further capacity. Where is the logic in that? Where, moreover, is the environmental logic? We are supposed to have a joined-up Government who take the environment seriously. Where is the environmental logic in people having to drive for miles to reach a post office?
	Holcombe has sheltered housing directly opposite the post office, but apparently Post Office Ltd was not aware of it. The post office has always provided a prescription service for the local surgery, and that too will go. As for Kingsdon, I went to a public meeting there at 9 o'clock on Saturday morning. More than 100 people were there; practically everyone on the village had gone to make their point. They were irate, because one of the things that the Post Office had said in the letter it had sent was that there was an alternative in Yeovilton. There are two problems with that alternative. First, it is on the royal naval air station base. People could not get past the two large Marines with machine guns at the gates, but even if they could, Yeovilton is one of the other post offices that are due to close, so it is not a great alternative.
	Charlton Horthorne and North Cadbury have been offered a van alternative. Vans are great—I would love to see mobile post offices dealing with many of the communities that have already lost their post offices—but the problem is that there is no commitment beyond three years, so we will lose our permanent post offices in return for the promise of a mobile service that may disappear.
	We have six weeks in which to make all those points, and we have been told that we will not have a result at the end of that period because of local elections. As we are not due to have any local elections in Somerset, we understand perfectly well that this is another example of the Government trying to cover their backs.
	The key issue is whether we regard post offices purely as commercial undertakings or as a public service. I regard them as a public service. When I hear people say that a particular post office has a small number of customers, I think that for those people it is an essential service, and it does not matter that they live in the country rather than, as would be convenient, in a big city. They should have access to the services that they need. When I am told that post offices have to make a profit, I wonder whether that will soon apply to our schools, roads and our military involvement in Basra. Must they make a profit, or else be closed down? Perhaps we should look at those post offices as a genuine people's post office. What an insult to run that campaign, when the post office is anything but the people's post office. It is the Minister's plaything, and it provides a profit for Post Office Ltd.
	We do not ask for much in our rural areas, but we rely on our village hall, our village school, our village shop and our village post office. I do not think that is too much to ask, and we should keep those post offices open as a genuine people's post office and a service for the people of this country.

Mark Hendrick: I begin by referring to a letter from the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry). It was addressed to me, but at the top of the letter it says, "Dear Gordon". I think the hon. Gentleman must be confusing me with the Prime Minister. If I did not find it amusing to be sent such a ridiculous letter, I would find it offensive.
	Many Members have talked about the impact of technology on the use of postal services—for example, people can now buy their road tax disc over the internet. However, I recently went to a post office in London to try to buy my television licence, and I was told that I had to go to a PayPoint. It is ridiculous that the Post Office is not still doing a deal with the television licence people so that we can get our licences at post offices.
	I do not think any Members are in favour of post office closures, but what we are in favour of is the best use of resources and maximising the economic and social benefits for our constituents. I can therefore see that the many Members representing rural constituencies who have argued for the retention of post offices have a strong case. In urban areas such as mine, I can perhaps see a case for the closure of the odd post office. Some post offices in and around Preston might be unprofitable, but it might also be too far to the next one. In particular, I make reference to Deepdale Road and Acregate Lane post offices and Moor Nook post office on Pope lane; they are popular and used by many people, but not all of them is profitable. The Opposition motion refers to 2,500 post offices being outlined for closure. I do not think there is any case for closing that many, but there would be a case for closing some of them. I would not expect this process to result in the closure of every post office that has been earmarked, and I include among them my own in Preston.
	Let me refer to another example of a petition, this one containing hundreds of names on the Manchester road post office. I understand that there is a sign in its window saying, "Say no to closures". However, when my office rang that post office, its postmaster told us he does not want a campaign against closure. He is angry about people going round with a petition campaigning to keep his post office open, because he wants to take the £60,000 offered to close the post office in his property. There are two sides to the story. It is important that hon. Members value post offices and the services that they provide, but the case for no closures cannot be made.

Angela Watkinson: I shall be as brief as possible in order to allow colleagues to make some brief remarks. It was encouraging to hear that hon. Members in all parts of the House appreciate the importance of the branch network of the Post Office, given its social function as well as the Post Office functions. We seem to have complete consensus on that. Rather less encouraging has been the fact that the only vision that many, but by no means all, Labour Members seem to have for the future of the post office network lies in taxpayer subsidy. The whole point of the motion is to suspend the closure programme so that we can examine the possibility of providing additional business opportunities or additional functions for post offices, in order to expand what they are doing, rather than shrink them, as has been happening over the past few years.
	In 2004, my constituency suffered three closures as a result of the absurdly named "urban reinvention programme". Somebody—I do not know who—was probably paid a large sum to think up that name, but which actually translated as, "We're going to close your post offices." My constituency now faces another three closures. The customers who suffered because of one of the first closures were sent to one of the post offices that is in the second round of closures. The distance to walk is much too far, in particular for elderly people. They cannot possibly walk 1 mile on a hill and then have to walk 1 mile back again. For elderly people or for young mothers with buggies and toddlers such distances are simply too far. I have spoken to a lot of elderly people who miss the social aspect of going to the post office every week. They now have to rely on neighbours, friends and family to go to the post office for them because it is no longer accessible for them.
	I should like to express my extreme disappointment in Postwatch. A week or so ago, London Members had a meeting with the Post Office—

Mark Williams: Of necessity, I shall be brief, as I have to address the issue of six potential post office closures in my constituency in just three minutes. We have 62 post offices, more than any other constituency in Wales, and I want to talk about the social effects of closure on local communities.
	The irony is that, sitting in the post offices in Devil's Bridge and Pontrhydfendigaid are awards recognising the services given by the post offices that they have provided to the local community, including services to the elderly and other businesses. They have also had a joint partnership with the Dyfed Powys police promoting the police force in what is a scattered community. The timing of this closure programme flies in the face of the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, empowering local people to make decisions on their own post offices and to reflect on the services that they need. The timing is also against the National Assembly's re-enactment of a post office development fund, which will come into effect next year, after the post offices have gone. Commendable efforts have been made by county councils in England, such as Essex, and they warrant consideration.
	I am especially concerned about those businesses in which a post office and a shop operate together, such as in Talybont, Devil's Bridge, Llanfarian, Llangeitho, Llanddewi Brefi, Talgarreg and Pontsian. As the hon. Member for Clwyd, West (Mr. Jones) said, once the post office or shop goes, the heart of the community is taken away. The village hall, the pub and the garage have probably already gone, and little is left. It is an issue of social cohesion.
	My constituents have no alternatives. I look at the criteria and I am told that 95 per cent. of people live within three miles of an alternative. I had an e-mail from a constituent today whose nearest alternative will be a round trip of 15 miles, if she wishes to access basic core post office services.
	We hear a lot about urban deprivation, but the rural deprivation factor has not been taken into account. West Wales and the valleys are a convergence funding area for good reason. Large tracts of Ceredigion are also Communities First regions, comparable with any other deprived area in the country. We face three closures in those areas.
	We have heard about outreach. My hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) talked about the three-year limit on the provision of services, but we are losing three outreach post vans. They were a sop to the community three years ago, but we are now losing them.

Charles Hendry: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby), who gave the shortest and probably the best speech of the entire debate.
	This has been an important, well attended and articulately argued debate. It is of great interest that not one person stood up to defend the closure programme and how it is proceeding. Some Labour Members stood up and told us that things are going badly wrong in their constituencies but then said, "Let's just keep on doing it." Indeed, the hon. Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter)—I am glad to see him back in the Chamber—spent the second half of his speech telling us how badly things were going having spent the first half condemning us for saying that there should be a suspension on those grounds. As the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) said, this is the last chance. There are no options left for trying to stop this misguided closure programme.
	We all agree on the crucial role of the post office and its vital role in communities up and down the country. My hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) spoke about the particularly important role that it plays in so many rural communities. My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) said that the issue was causing as much concern now as any that he can remember. He spoke, he said, as a retailer of 120 years' experience. I had not realised that he was as old as that. I knew that he was wise, but that puts it in perspective.
	It is right that we should use this occasion to pay tribute to sub-postmasters and mistresses up and down the country. They serve their communities with tremendous dedication and work hard for long hours. They serve those communities well and they want it to be recognised that they do not just run businesses. They are part of the social fabric of their communities, too.
	Only two things have been missing in the debate. First, no voices have been raised in support of the closure programme. Secondly, we have not heard those Labour MPs who have been so eloquent in their local newspapers and on their websites but did not come to repeat those words today.
	The motion does not suggest that we do not need change. Of course we need change. We recognise that. The post office network needs to move on to reflect the way that people live their lives. The motion is also not about an absolute solution for the post office network. That is a serious long-term issue, which will take a long time to sort out. The motion recognises that the closure programme is failing, that it is opposed by almost every Member of Parliament in their constituencies and by almost every national newspaper. If it is not suspended, it will result in massive, permanent, unnecessary damage to our communities.
	I pay tribute to the hon. Members for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Geraldine Smith), for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson), for Pendle and for Leicester, South. They have said that they will vote with us tonight. That is not an easy decision, and I recognise that. It is undoubtedly the right decision, however.
	Let me make a couple of other points absolutely clear, too, particularly in response to the comments made by the Secretary of State. We are committed to putting £1.7 billion into the post office network over the next three years. We have said that we will honour the Government's spending commitments when we come into government. That is part of the process. We would expect the amount to be less if more post offices can be kept open, because part of that figure includes the compensation package. We are also committed to spending £150 million a year on the continuing subsidy, although the central point of our approach is that we should allow the post offices to develop new businesses and new income streams, so that the £150 million can be used to keep more post offices open.
	The Secretary of State made many points. If he were really convincing about his closure programme, though, I wonder why it is that half of his Cabinet colleagues are openly campaigning against it. He talked about what happened under the Conservatives, when 3,000 post offices were closed in 18 years. That compares with the 6,000 that have been closed in just over 10 years of this Labour Government—a rate of closure that is three times as high as previously.
	However, the fundamental difference is that the closures under the previous Conservative Government were voluntary, whereas the current ones are enforced. People are having their businesses taken away from them, and they have no choice and no way to stop the process.
	The Secretary of State also said, rather proudly, that there was no subsidy for post offices when the Conservatives were in government, but the figures are clear. In the last few years of our time in office, the Post Office made a profit of between £22 million and £35 million a year. It did not start losing money until 2000, when this Government had had the chance to interfere for a bit. Since then, it has been losing £50 million, £100 million and nearly £200 million a year. The Government do not recognise the difference between the conditions that prevailed when we were in power and those that obtain today.
	The Secretary of State also said that there are no constraints on the businesses that post offices can carry out, but he should come with me and talk to sub-postmasters. They want to offer PayPoint but have been told that they cannot. They want to work with carriers other than the Royal Mail—for example, FedEx, UPS and others—but they have been told that they are not allowed to. Moreover, they must face the problem that Royal Mail will go to their biggest customers and persuade them into direct deals that cut post offices out by undercutting the stamp price that those offices are allowed to charge.
	The Secretary of State missed the fundamental point about the constraints being placed on future business, about which so many colleagues spoke in the debate. It is bad enough for people to have their post office taken away, but it is obscene for the Government to put in place measures that will serve to close down the whole shop as well. To tell postmasters and postmistresses that they may no longer operate the national lottery, operate PayPoint terminals or offer the facilities that they have spent years understanding is to do massive damage to the communities that they serve.
	It is one thing for the Post Office to say that people may no longer buy a stamp from a shop, but to say that they will no longer be able to buy their bread and milk there is to go way beyond its powers. In addition, many of the services offered by post offices will simply be moved to the shop next door, if there is one. That means that people will not migrate naturally from the post office that has closed to the one a few miles away; instead, they will simply go to the shop next door.
	Also discussed were the talks about the one-for-one issue, and the implications of that approach. Perhaps the Secretary of State should look at those figures as well. So far, 671 closures have been announced in those areas where the consultation process has been completed. As a result of what has gone on, 26 offices have been reprieved, and 19 replaced by other post offices being added to the closure list. So seven out of nearly 700 post offices have genuinely been reprieved. Earlier today, the Prime Minister said that that proportion was about 10 per cent. of the total, although I think that it is about 1 per cent. However, if he makes it 10 per cent., maybe that explains why the economy is in such a mess.
	Many hon. Members have spoken of their concerns about the consultation process. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) said that six weeks might be appropriate for a matter that was not controversial but that it was otherwise too short a period. My hon. Friends the Members for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) spoke about the factual errors that had been made, and the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Mr. Cawsey) mentioned the people who wanted to close their post offices but who were not being allowed to do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner)—it is a great pleasure to see him speaking in this Chamber again—spoke for many when he said that there was a great sense that the decisions had already been made.
	Excellent contributions were also made by my hon. Friends the Members for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb), for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown), for Clwyd, West (Mr. Jones) and for Upminster (Angela Watkinson)—although I suspect that the way that my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West reeled off the names of his villages was a nightmare for the  Official Report.
	Other hon. Members also contributed to the debate through their comments on their websites and elsewhere. For example, the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) says on his site:
	"There are no direct bus routes to either of the alternative branches".
	He states that one of them is
	"on a red route! Your decision concerning Meads Lane is in my opinion driven by short term cost cutting dogma."
	The hon. Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Glenda Jackson) intervened in the debate and told us why she would not vote for our motion, but on her website she says:
	"We really believe that these closures will affect the most vulnerable people in our community, particularly those who are elderly, disabled or those with young children."
	However, she will not vote with us to stop that happening. The hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer), a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, said:
	"We shall oppose this as we believe the local Post Office is an essential part of any community."
	The Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, the hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr. Lammy)—a Government Minister—said:
	"I hardly think that six weeks is long enough to have a meaningful dialogue with the community about these changes."
	Perhaps most deliciously of all, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who in other days would have been supporting us, said in the  Grantham Journal that,
	"this week, the Post Office broke new ground among public bodies in demonstrating either complete internal confusion or deliberate public two-facedness."
	If anybody would recognise two-facedness, it is he.
	When we put our points about the consultation process to the Minister, he said, "It's Cabinet Office rules; we've got to stick to them," but that same Minister decided to disregard those rules, which said that a consultation process should last 12 weeks, rather than 6 weeks, so one thing applies in the run-up to local elections and another during the consultation process. Little wonder that the many people in our constituencies who have gone to public meetings on wet, dark wintry nights, who have signed petitions, who have written letters, who have gone on marches, and who have done everything that they can to preserve the facility that they care about, feel let down by the process.
	There has been a lot of debate about the access criteria. My hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire talked about the fact that the distance as the crow flies does not reflect the true distance. My hon. Friend the Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin) and the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole talked about bus routes, and how the buses do not go in the right direction, meaning that a journey takes much longer than would have been the case. Again, Labour Members have argued the point on their websites and in their local newspapers. Not all of them have been so assiduous, however; on his website, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said of his local post office closures:
	"Member's of Ed's staff visited the Postmaster at Adwick on Ed's behalf".
	Well, I bet they got the bunting out for that one. How privileged local people must have felt that their Member of Parliament was taking the issue so seriously. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Mr. Timms), formerly Minister with responsibility for small business, said it was important to pick
	"the right one and not the wrong ones".
	My goodness, one can see why he was made a Minister, and perhaps why he was moved on.
	The problem with the access criteria is that they are fundamentally flawed. It is simply a matter of somebody at a computer deciding, as a matter of geography, which post offices should close and which stay open. They have failed to take account of major new housing developments and, worse still, they have not paid sufficient attention to hills, public transport links or unsafe roads. It will therefore be vulnerable people, older people and people with disabilities who suffer most. They are the people who depend most on their local post offices, and who will lose out most when the changes are made.
	Be in no doubt: this is not the Post Office's policy. This is the Government's closure programme, because they decided how many post offices should close. They decided what the funding package and access criteria should be, and they decided which rules apply to the businesses that many people may continue once their post office has closed down. The Government can, if they wish, tonight instruct the Post Office to stop the programme.
	We want a Post Office fit for the challenges of the 21st century, a Post Office not stuck in the past but able to take full advantage of the business opportunities present today. We welcome change, but we have a vision for the post office network; it should be sustained by new business, freed from the restrictions that tie it down today, and increasingly become a hub for local council and government services. However, that is not what the change programme is delivering; it is dismantling an important, much-loved service. We do not object to change, but we do object to the change that the Government are proposing, the flawed access criteria, the shortened consultation process, the lack of vision for future business and the appalling restrictions on future business activity.
	At the end of the day, what people say on their websites and press releases will not save a single post office. If Labour Members of Parliament genuinely want to save their post offices, they have one chance, and that is to vote with us today.
	This comes down to a question of trust. If we want people to have faith in their politicians, they must believe that politicians will not say one thing in their constituency on behalf of their communities, and vote against those words in the House of Commons. Constituents will not understand how MPs told them that they were on their side, but when they had the chance to vote against closures, they failed to do so. MPs will have failed their constituents, and they will have failed to live up to the standards that people should rightly expect of their Member of Parliament. Worse still, they will have turned their back on the elderly and others who are most in need. That betrayal of the most vulnerable people in their constituency will haunt them for the rest of their career.

Patrick McFadden: I am afraid that I want to make progress.
	Many Members raised the issue of consultation, including my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) and for Brigg and Goole, the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner), and my hon. Friends the Members for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) and Hastings and Rye. I acknowledge that there has been dissatisfaction and disquiet about the consultation process. Representations have been made that we should extend it from six weeks to 12, but six weeks was the period used during the last period of post office closures and is the period agreed between Postwatch and Post Office Ltd. in their code of practice— [ Interruption. ]

Patrick McFadden: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	Many hon. Members talked about the consultation, which is about how, not whether, this is to be done. The Select Committee on Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform picked up on that in its most recent report, and it was right to do so. Post Office Ltd must be more clear that that is the question before the people, because that is what is producing some of the frustration in local communities. Hon. Members have expressed confusion about this. Let me quote the letter that was sent to all hon. Members back in July, before the process began. It said that the consultation
	"would not concern the principle of the need for change of the network, nor its broad extent and distribution...rather consultation will be seeking representations on the most effective way in which government policy can best be implemented in the area in question".

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuantto Standing Order No. 118(6) (Delegated Legislation Committees),

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 119(9)(European Standing Committees),

Alistair Burt: I have the honour to present a petition with historic overtones.
	Some 250 years ago, Admiral John Byng was court-martialled and executed on the quarter-deck of his ship for a perceived naval failure. It was his execution that gave rise to Voltaire's satirical phrase in "Candide", which has been passed down to us today as "In England they execute the occasional admiral pour encourager les autres".
	Born and buried in the village of Southill in my constituency, Admiral Byng's memory, and the sense of injustice among those who feel that he was convicted when it might have been the Government in the dock for providing him with inadequate ships and men, have led the petitioners—consisting of family and friends and some 600 signatories—to seek redress so that the wrong of his court martial and sentence can be finally righted, and the stigma of his unjust fate may be removed from his family with the sensitivity and understanding that have become more acceptable in modern times than in the past.
	The petition states:
	The Petition of the friends of All Saints Southill, the parishioners of Southill, Byng family members and the supporters of Admiral John Byng,
	Declares that the conduct at his trail and the verdict of his trial in December 1756 and January/February 1757, which resulted in his execution on 14th March 1757 was unfair and unjust. Further declares that he was made the scapegoat for the inadequacies of the Government and his Naval Superiors at the time, whom the Petitioners believe to have been responsible for the loss of Menorca to the French.
	The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Ministry for Defence and the Ministry for Justice to review the trial and the verdict of that trial, resulting in Admiral John Byng being declared innocent posthumously; his Honour should be restored for him, his family and supporters.
	And the Petitioners remain, etc.
	[P000153]

Gordon Banks: I am grateful for the opportunity to speak tonight. I am increasingly of the opinion that Adjournment debates are like buses—you wait for one a long time, then two or three come along at once. The House may be aware that I secured an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall last week on the important issue of the banning of looped blind cords. Tonight, I wish to raise another important issue, and although I am certainly not complaining about the opportunity I have been given, some of my staff are.
	To get down to business, tonight's debate is on an important issue. It has been in the headlines recently, but I am concerned we should not allow the sometimes divisive issue of organ donation to slip off the radar. I have been working closely with a local paper in my constituency,  The Alloa Advertiser, since the end of January to try to promote the positive benefits of an opt-out system, and to encourage donors to sign up to the existing system to ensure that those in need of organs are given the best possible chance of life. As I said a few moments ago, there is a national focus on the issue, but as with everything, it is transient. We need to keep focused on this issue, as people's lives dependon it.
	Perhaps I should spend a little time outlining why we have a severe shortage of organs. We are living longer, and conditions that would have killed us some years ago are managed and controlled. That is a good thing, but it creates a twofold pressure. First, some of the conditions with which we live require transplants and, secondly, as we live longer, fewer people are dying, which in itself creates a reduction in the number of organs for transplant. In addition, road deaths are less than half what they were in the 1970s despite, as we all know, a great increase in the numbers of cars and, indeed, a population increase. It is great that our roads and our cars are safer—and we must strive to make them even safer—but the statistics highlight a great pressure on available organs.
	I believe the current system is too restrictive, as it does not meet the increasing demands placed on it. Quite simply, the organ donor rate in the UK is unacceptably low, with most European countries having a much higher rate than us—some of them twice or even three times the UK rate. We have reached a point where there is public demand for change. I believe that there is a desire for change in the House, too, which is demonstrated by early-day motion 967 in my name, which has attracted the signatures of 52 fellow Members. There are more than 7,000 people in the UK on waiting lists for organ donations, and more than 400 people die each year still waiting—more than one person a day. In Clackmannanshire, which forms part of my seat, four people have died in the past five years waiting for transplants. Bodies are buried or cremated complete with organs that could have been used to save lives, not necessarily because the deceased objected to donation, but simply because they never got round to signing up to the organ donor register or informing their relatives of their wishes.

Gordon Banks: I thank my hon. Friend for his remarks. I favour a soft opt-out where the family retains the ability to be consulted, but where we come at it from a position of presumed consent as opposed to a presumed lack of consent. Countries such as Austria operate the system that he mentions. It has a high level of uptake and availability of organ donations, so he makes a strong argument.
	There is a need for investment in the short term, but the sooner the extra money is found, the better, as there will be long-term savings for the national health service and improvements in people's quality of life. I recognise that increased funding for transplants has been allocated by the Government: heart and lung funding has increased by almost £8 million since 2002; liver funding has almost doubled since 1997; and pancreas transplant services' funding has more than doubled since 2004 to more than £8 million. That investment is very welcome.
	Last month, I visited the renal unit at Falkirk and District royal infirmary and found out that it costs the NHS on average £400 per treatment. If people require three treatments per week, as my constituent Anne Duncombe does, we are talking about more than £1,000 a week, possibly for many years. The cost benefit of a kidney transplant is staggering—the NHS is £241,000 better off over a 10-year period for every transplant patient. No one has to be an economist to see the real financial value to the NHS of a transplant, never mind the ability of the recipient to work, pay taxes and improve their quality of life.
	Dialysis is not just a financial burden; it can often mean 18 to 20 hours per week to people if time for treatment, travelling and so on is taken into account. The renal unit at Falkirk and District royal infirmary is treating more and more patients from throughout the Forth valley due to the ever-increasing demand for organs. The unit has almost doubled in size since it opened in 1999. It now treats 100 dialysis patients, but only one in four of them each year receive the kidney that they need.
	A lot of money could be allocated elsewhere if a successful opt-out system is launched. Each region should have a dedicated team ready to operate when needed to remove organs, and there should also be a national database prioritising organs that are urgently required, particularly for children. Another important point is that we must ensure that any attempts at political separation in the UK do not detract from the need to have a UK-wide solution to the organ donation issue.

Gordon Banks: I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. The transplant situation in Scotland is governed by the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006. There are noises from the Scottish Executive that they are minded to favour a soft opt-out, but we will have to wait to see whether they deliver. The situation in the rest of the UK is governed by an Act passed in 2004, and my hon. Friend will note the two-year disparity. We cannot allow such a disparity if the situation is changed in the rest of the UK and Scotland is left behind.
	Limiting the availability of organs to one region would have some serious implications. As with so many matters, we are stronger as part of the Union, and in this case a UK-wide system increases the likelihood of an organ becoming available. Who will be the one to tell my constituents that their chance of receiving an organ transplant has been drastically cut, because we can only harvest them from Scotland? I hope that no one ever has to utter such words.
	Therefore I am pleased that the NHS Blood and Transplant Authority has commissioned work to develop and design an electronic system for offering donor organs throughout the United Kingdom. I understand from the Department's reply to one of my written questions that this system will be ready to go live in September this year. I am sure that the Minister will agree with me that this is an important step forward.
	The organ donation taskforce took note of the systems being implemented by some of our European neighbours, such as Spain, where a change in the law and the necessary reform in the health service has boosted the number of organs available for transplant. The organ donation rate in Spain is 35 per cent., compared with 13 per cent. here in the UK.
	It is important here to distinguish between the number of people carrying cards and on the register, which is 25 per cent. and the number of organs used in transplant, which is 13 per cent. There could be many explanations for this disparity. We may die in the "wrong way", organs from potential donors may be incompatible with those in need at that time, and many people carrying donor cards may be young people who are encouraged to sign up when they apply for their driving licence. Their organs are unlikely to be available for many years to come. So a 25 per cent. base of card-carrying donors delivers only half that number of organs for transplant.
	Hard-hitting campaigns are being launched here in the UK, particularly the "Live or die? You choose" campaign, which is on our television screens now. I praise the work of the NHS Blood and Transplant Authority, but there is a limit to how effective such campaigns can be when our organ donation system is so fractured.
	Every hon. Member will know that changes in the law can often be slow and cumbersome, but the longer we wait, the more lives we put at risk. I encourage all hon. Members to put this message across in their local media, so that we can raise the profile of this issue. Members could promote their constituency office as a place where people could come along to sign up to become organ donors; launch campaigns in the local press and highlight the plight of those waiting for organs; go out and meet those in their constituency who are waiting for a transplant; and look at the facilities and speak with staff at their local hospital. It is only by putting across the human side that we will encourage more people to come forward as organ donors. We need to raise awareness and encourage the public to sign up to help others in need by giving them the gift of life.
	Some hon. Members will be aware that in my Adjournment debate last week I highlighted the issue of the dangers associated with looped blind cords and the tragic death of a toddler in my constituency, Muireann McLaughlin. Muireann's parents, at a time of tremendous grief, decided to help to give the gift of life to another when two of Muireann's heart valves were donated. That ties in with recommendation 12 made by the organ donation taskforce that there should be some way to recognise the brave decisions of parents in such situations.
	As with any issue, there is always an opposing view. I understand and sympathise with that view, and whether it is held on moral or religious grounds it is equally valid. There should be a database of people who do not want their organs to be used for transplant, giving people the opportunity to opt out. If someone felt strongly enough, I am certain they would ensure their name was on the database. It sounds tough and harsh, but so are the deaths of 400 people per year, many of whom are children.
	It is not a case of nationalising organs, as has been suggested in the past. People waiting for organs get very angry at those who take that view. It is a case of trying to save lives using all means possible. With a soft opt-out, donation would become the default position. The introduction of a soft system of presumed consent would represent a shift in emphasis in favour of donation without major changes to practice. It would respect the wishes of potential donors and the sensitivities of their families.
	To sum up, I hope that I have put a case that outlines the need for a change to our system of organ donation. I urge hon. Members to sign early-day motion 967, which is in my name, and urge the Government to move to an opt-out system with the necessary structural changes in the service as quickly as possible. There are enough organs in the UK to satisfy demand, and it is simply the system that holds us back from transplanting them into those who need them. It is my hope that the Minister will address the issues I have raised, and also propose some time scales for when we can look to take the organ donation taskforce's proposals forward.
	As I mentioned earlier, the longer we wait the more lives we put at risk. As a responsible country, we cannot and should not allow this.